Hostage-Taker Shot Dead In Beijing Last Night (With Video)

Beijing is not a city where you expect to hear about someone being shot dead, but that’s what happened last night when a man took a security guard hostage at knifepoint inside Subway Line 10′s Hujialou station. According to Beijing TV this morning, the incident began just after 9 pm (UPDATE: “around 8:30 pm,” according to the reporter in the above video). Police were called in and tried negotiating for 70 minutes. When that failed, a sniper took out the man, and the hostage was freed.

In the above, you can clearly see the hostage-taker, a man in a suit and glasses. You can watch police position themselves, and glimpse the sniper rifle eventually used to end the standoff.

The Beijinger has this story as well, with pictures from QQ, along with translations of netizen comments from Weibo. “The guy who got shot is the abandoned child of society,” says one. “Women should all work in offices,” says another. (The Internet for you, in a nutshell.) You can join the conversation here if you’d like (1,000-plus comments so far).

After the jump, there’s a video taken by a citizen journalist shortly after this incident happened. You can’t really see anything, but he does point out that a lot of cops were in the area.

UPDATE, 7/21, 8:43 pm: New video here; we still don’t know what the hostage-taker’s demands were though.